Candy- or sugar-coated chewing gums are well known in the art. The sugar-based coatings may be applied to chewing gum employing procedures such as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,554,767 to Daum et al, 2,304,246 to Ekert, 2,460,698 to Lindhe, 3,208,405 to Beer, and 3,635,735 to Patil.
Generally, prior to coating chewing gum pieces by conventional coating procedures, the chewing gum pieces must be first subjected to a long, time-consuming conditioning or aging period of upwards of 24 to 48 hours or more to be certain that the sugar coating to be applied will uniformly adhere to the chewing gum pieces. A discussion of this problem and the fact that shortening of the aging period is not an acceptable solution is set out in column 1 of U.S. Pat. No. 3,635,735 to Patil. Patil's solution is using an accelerated process which includes evaporative cooling of gum mass initially prepared at an elevated temperature by mixing wet saccharides, such as corn syrup or table sugar combined with water with molten gum base centers, at an elevated temperature to coat the gum base centers and vacuum drying the gum centers at various stages of coating.